Insights into the psyche of activists and suggestions for organising
and motivating us.
October 2000
 |
| Critical Mass Bicycle Riders promote clean air on the Sydney Harbour Bridge, during Kyoto Climate Change Summit, November 1997. Photo by Matthew Whitaker |
Introduction
As an activist and
hacker[Jar],
I have seen people donate huge amounts of time and energy for minimal personal
gain. I have seen effective organising techniques used by hackers being
copied and used equally effectively by activists. (When I refer to
hackers
I am using the
traditional definition [Jar], a person who writes code for
the joy of it, not someone who breaks into computer systems.)
In this essay I attempt to understand what motivates activists and how
to organise us to maximise the potential of an organisation.
I propose the most effective way to organise people is with a non-hierarchic
power structure where no one has the power to command or limit the enthusiasm
of another.
Before the internet, organisations required hierarchy to streamline
communication if they wanted to grow bigger than a small group. With email
and the web, communication has become cheap and efficient and large non-hierarchical
organisations can thrive, often outperforming their hierarchical equivalents.
Understanding this essay should allow activists to maximise their
potential. For others I hope it will prove informative and entertaining.
Look at me Mummy!
Humans are wired to search out recognition from their peers and activists
are no different. In
The secrets of happy children [Bid],
Steve Biddulph, a family therapist, wrote the following about adults' need
for recognition.
Apart from physical touch, we find other ways to get good feelings
from people. The most obvious one is by using words.
We need to be recognised, noticed and, preferably, given sincere
praise. We want to be included in conversations, have our ideas listened
to and even admired.
A three-year-old says it straight: "Hey, look at me."
...
I am sometimes reduced to stitches by the realisation that most
of the adult world is made up of three-year-olds running about shouting,
"Look at me, Daddy", "Watch me, you guys". Not me of course - I give lectures
and write books out of mature adult concern.
Activists find recognition by saying, "Look Mummy, I was part of that demonstration
which helped change the course of history." Many of the most effective
activists, myself included, are driven by a craving for recognition.
While children searching for recognition is cute, it is considered childish
amongst adults. As a consequence, many activists will agree that some activists
are ego driven, but not them. They are involved purely to create a better
society for everyone. People have learnt to practice the maxim "Don't blow
your own trumpet." Instead people will take on jobs within the activist
movement in the hope that others will notice. If the effort isn't noticed,
the activist is likely to become disappointed, and drift out of the movement.
Consequently, to keep volunteers it is important to regularly notice
achievements and publicly praise them.
I'm not worthy!
Critical mass Sydney draws its biggest crowd in November when everyone
rides over the Sydney Harbour Bridge. This is
critical mass's best
shot at publicity and activists usually rally and put together a mammoth
effort. However, in 1999 many of the old timers were out of town and the
newbies were slow to step forward. It wasn't because the newbies were not
talented, or unwilling. After I talked to a few newbies, Fiona stepped
in as a competent spokesperson, Eduado organised a banner painting workshop
and Michael wrote an excellent article for a cycling magazine. They all
shouldered their jobs willingly, but only after they were invited to do
so. I've found this to be typical behaviour amongst activists, which begs
the question, why don't activists volunteer in the first place? Possibly
the newbies didn't think of the idea, except I ran the ideas though our
email lists with minimal response. Often the newbies feel they won't do
as good job as the old timers, except in this case the old timers were
not helping out at all. What people regularly say is "I've only been around
for a few rides and didn't want to step on anyone's toes." They didn't
feel worthy to take on important roles until invited.
Community responsibility
I joined the bush-walking club when I went to University and on my first
walk we were to be picked up at a train station in the Blue Mountains and
driven to an idyllic location to camp. After waiting at the station for
an hour I decided to hitch and then walk into the campsite myself. From
the sketch map I had it only seemed like 20km and I figured I'd get there
before dark. Besides, the first part of the trip was along a busy road
and I'd be sure to get a lift.
I couldn't be more wrong, the campsite was probably more like 60km away
and despite the busy road having cars zoom past us in a constant stream,
no one stopped. Luckily, on the dirt road, where cars only passed every
half hour or so, I picked up two lifts, both times from the first car that
passed. This is a prime example of human sense of responsibility. On the
main road the passers by didn't need to worry about my plight, there was
plenty of other cars that could pick me up. However, on the dirt road the
same drivers knew that if they didn't pick me up then I'd be wandering
around for another half hour before I had another chance at another lift.
The dirt road drivers felt more responsible for my fate and helped me out.
In an activist movement, participants feel a responsibility to ensure
the movement's success. This responsibility is stronger in old timers who
have invested more effort into the movement and inversely proportional
to the number of people in the organisation. It is like a farming community
defending its crops or a tribe defending its water holes. This is another
explanation as to why the people in the previous section responded to a
personal phone call, but not a collective invitation. When I rang these
people I pointed out that no one else had volunteered for the task, that
they were the best person for the task and if they did not take on the
task then it would not be done.
Invoking a little sense of responsibility in activists can be effective,
but it cannot be overplayed. Being overwhelmed by responsibility is not
fun. It is called guilt and is the quickest way to loose volunteers.
Activism as a gift culture
Activists and computer hackers work hard, for no pay, for the good of the
greater community. The reason humans perform these incredible acts of selfless
generosity has been described by Eric S. Raymond in
Homesteading the Noosphere [Noos] as a Gift Culture.
Human beings have an innate drive to compete for social status;
it's wired in by our evolutionary history. For the 90% of that history
that ran before the invention of agriculture, our ancestors lived in small
nomadic hunting-gathering bands. High-status individuals (those most effective
at informing coalitions and persuading others to cooperate with them) got
the healthiest mates and access to the best food.
...
Gift cultures are adaptations not to scarcity but to abundance.
They arise in populations that do not have significant material-scarcity
problems with survival goods. We can observe gift cultures in action among
aboriginal cultures living in ecozones with mild climates and abundant
food. We can also observe them in certain strata of our own society, especially
in show business and among the very wealthy.
...
In gift cultures, social status is determined not by what you control
but by what you give away.
...
For examined in this way, it is quite clear that the society of
open-source hackers is in fact a gift culture. Within it, there is no serious
shortage of the `survival necessities' -- disk space, network bandwidth,
computing power. Software is freely shared. This abundance creates a situation
in which the only available measure of competitive success is reputation
among one's peers.
...
The reputation-game analysis has some implications that may not
be immediately obvious. Many of these derive from the fact that one gains
more prestige from founding a successful project than from co-operating
in an existing one. One also gains more from projects which are strikingly
innovative, as opposed to being `me, too' incremental improvements on software
that already exists. On the other hand, software that nobody but the author
understands or has a need for is a non-starter in the reputation game and
it's often easier to attract good notice by contributing to an existing
project than it is to get people to notice a new one. Finally, it's much
harder to compete with an already successful project than it is to fill
an empty niche.
...
Continued devotion to hard, boring work (like debugging, or writing
documentation) is more praiseworthy than cherry-picking the fun and easy
hacks.
Similarly, in our western society almost everyone has the necessities to
live, and participating in activist activities costs little. Hence people
have the luxury to be able to give time and energy to the activist community.
In an activist gift culture, tasks are chosen rather than allocated.
People naturally select and excel at tasks they are interested in and consequently,
a gift culture is one of the most effective ways to organise people.
Structurelessness
Critical mass
is an organised coincidence where swarms of cyclists happen to ride in
the same direction at the same time during peak hour traffic.
By definition, no one is in charge of
critical mass, or put another
way, everyone is in charge. I've seen police try to tackle
critical
mass by first asking "Who is in charge". "I am", someone yells, "I
am" someone else yells. Very soon everyone is claiming to be in charge.
This is incredibly amusing for the activists and very disarming for the
poor police.
Whilst
critical mass claims to be leaderless and it may well
have started that way, a subtle power structure has emerged. People who
build a reputation for achieving gain respect. However, the respected
elders
are not in a position to constrain another's initiatve. For instance, if
a
newbie suggests a press stunt which an
elder finds inappropriate,
the
newbie can still go ahead with the stunt. However it is unlikely
others in the group would join in. Funnily enough, this situation rarely
happens. Usually the
elders will suggest modifications, which the
newbie
takes on board and the group will take part with the
elders' blessing.
In 1970 Jo Freeman wrote about the myth of structureless in the women's
movement in
The Tyrannyof Structurelessness [Free].
During the years in which the women's liberation movement has been
taking shape, a great emphasis has been placed on what are called leaderless,
structureless groups as the main form of the movement. The source of this
idea was a natural reaction against the overstructured society in which
most of us found ourselves, the inevitable control this gave others over
our lives and the continual elitism of the Left and similar groups among
those who were supposedly fighting this over-structuredness.
The idea of structurelessness, however, has moved from a healthy
counter to these tendencies to becoming a goddess in its own right. The
idea is as little examined as the term is much used, but it has become
an intrinsic and unquestioned part of women's liberation ideology. For
the early development of the movement this did not much matter. It early
defined its main method as consciousness raising and the structureless
rap group was an excellent means to this end. Its looseness and informality
encouraged participation in discussion and the often supportive atmosphere
elicited personal insight.
...
The basic problems didn't appear until individual rap groups exhausted
the virtues of consciousness raising and decided they wanted to do something
more specific. At this point they usually floundered because most groups
were unwilling to change their structure when they changed their task.
Women had thoroughly accepted the idea of structurelessness without realizing
the limitations of its uses.
...
Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing
as a structureless group. Any group of people of whatever nature coming
together for any length of time, for any purpose, will inevitably structure
itself in some fashion. The structure may be flexible, it may vary over
time, it may evenly or unevenly distribute tasks, power and resources over
the members of the group. But it will be formed regardless of the abilities,
personalities and intentions of the people involved. The very fact that
we are individuals with different talents, predispositions and backgrounds
makes this inevitable.
...
If the movement continues deliberately not to select who shall exercise
power, it does not thereby abolish power. All it does is abdicate the right
to demand that those who do exercise power and influence be responsible
for it. If the movement continues to keep power as diffuse as possible
because it knows it cannot demand responsibility from those who have it,
it does prevent any group or person from totally dominating. But it simultaneously
ensures that the movement is as ineffective as possible.
Eric S. Raymond describes a similar, loosely organised power structure
amongst the thriving computer hacker culture in
Homesteading the Noosphere [Noos].
The implicit theory of the Open Source [Licenses] ... is that anyone
can hack anything. Nothing prevents half a dozen different people from
taking any given open-source product ... duplicating the sources, running
off with them in different evolutionary directions, but all claiming to
be the product.
...
In fact (and in contradiction to the anyone-can-hack-anything consensus
theory) the open-source culture has an elaborate but largely unadmitted
set of ownership customs. These customs regulate who can modify software,
the circumstances under which it can be modified and (especially) who has
the right to redistribute modified versions back to the community.
Eric S. Raymond goes on to argue that these ownership customs are virtually
identical to the Anglo-American common-law theory of land tenure.
In this theory, there are three ways to acquire ownership of land.
On a frontier, where land exists that has never had an owner, one
can acquire ownership by homesteading, mixing one's labour with the unowned
land, fencing it and defending one's title.
The usual means of transfer in settled areas is transfer of title,
that is receiving the deed from the previous owner. In this theory, the
concept of `chain of title' is important. The ideal proof of ownership
is a chain of deeds and transfers extending back to when the land was originally
homesteaded.
Finally, the common-law theory recognises that land title may be
lost or abandoned (for example, if the owner dies without heirs, or the
records needed to establish chain of title to vacant land are gone). A
piece of land that has become derelict in this way may be claimed by adverse
possession -- one moves in, improves it and defends title as if homesteading.
This theory, like hacker customs, evolved organically in a context
where central authority was weak or nonexistent. It developed over a period
of a thousand years from Norse and Germanic tribal law. Because it was
systematized and rationalized in the early modern era by the English political
philosopher John Locke, it is sometimes referred to as the `Lockean' theory
of property.
While from a distance the 1970s Women's movement and hackers share similar
power structures, there are subtle differences which make the hackers significantly
more effective as the group expands.
-
Hackers acknowledge rather than fight the natural power structure.
-
Anyone can take the initiative and start a project or make a decision,
with or without the groups blessing. This ensures creativity is not stifled
while waiting for group consensus.
-
Hackers have exploited the effective communication channels of the internet.
Oh no, its anarchy!
A
non-hierarchic structure is sometimes described as
anarchy.
Liz A. Highleyman summarises
anarchy well in
An Introduction to Anarchism [High].
The basic tenet of anarchism is that hierarchical authority --
be it state, church, patriarchy or economic elite -- is not only unnecessary,
but is inherently detrimental to the maximization of human potential. Anarchists
generally believe that human beings are capable of managing their own affairs
on the basis of creativity, cooperation, and mutual respect. It is believed
that power is inherently corrupting, and that authorities are inevitably
more concerned with self-perpetuation and increasing their own power than
they are with doing what is best for their constituents. Anarchists generally
maintain that ethics are a personal matter, and should be based upon concern
for others and the wellbeing of society, rather than upon laws imposed
by a legal or religious authority.
While I suggest activists adopt an
anarchic power structure, they
need not adopt other anarchic ideals which sometimes include violent action
and destroying existing institutions.
Communication, Size and
Structure
Activist movements generally start when a handful of people a drawn together
to work on a cause. A loosely organised power structure develops. Issues
are worked out at face-to-face meetings, or over the telephone.
As the movement grows, meetings become unwieldy and traditional hierarchical
models become attractive. These come with elected positions: presidents,
secretaries, treasurers and so forth, while everyone else is just a member.
Each position has responsibilities defined and people are expected to respect
these roles. This significantly reduces the need for communication since
decision making is limited to a few office bearers. Instead of meetings
and telephones, newsletters and public addresses are used to notify members
of decisions that have been made, rather than involving members in the
decision making process.
However, the standard hierarchical model limits the potential of its
members.
-
Often, there are not enough positions for the volunteers, hence many volunteers
are left without the prestige of a position and will leave, or will not
perform to their potential.
-
Volunteer energy is wasted fighting for elected positions.
-
Volunteers have varying and random amounts of time and motivation. Consequently,
volunteers often don't apply for a position, don't do all the duties for
the position, or are not used to their full potential.
-
Volunteers drift in and out of organisations. It is important ensure the
volunteer is useful as soon as they join rather than wait for the next
election.
-
Volunteers who do not feel useful will leave.
-
Managing people takes time. It is better if volunteers are given the opportunity
to manage themselves.
-
Hierarchical models tend to come with excessive house keeping. Tracking
membership, keeping minutes, drawing up constitutions and so on. This reduces
efectiveness.
Consequently, it is desirable for a movement to maintain a loosely organised
power structure for as long as possible. Computer hackers have developed
very effective communication tools based on the internet which enable large
groups of to maintain loose power structures. These tools are used by
critical
mass Sydney and have allowed it to grow to over 1000 participants without
becoming structured or bogged down in internal communication.
Internal Communication
Communication is the lifeblood of any organisation and activism is no exception.
The efficiency of communication sets a ceiling on the effectiveness of
an organisation.
Like
hackers[Jar],
activists suffer from some physical limitations which are less common in
traditional organisations.
-
Groups of hackers/activists rarely work in the same building and face to
face meetings involve wasting significant time in transit.
-
The hacking/activism is done in spare time after finishing a real job and
domestic duties. This means that keeping abreast with issues takes
a higher percentage of a person's time than someone working full time.
Also, it is difficult to co-ordinate a time when a group of hackers/activists
can meet.
To solve these issues, computer hackers have forged the internet into an
extremely effective communication tool. In many ways it is more effective
than the traditional tools used by traditional corporations. The success
of this communication can be measured by the success of
Open
Source Software, hackers software which is given away for free. Linux,
Apache, Perl, TCP/IP, DNS, are some of the famous open source successes.
Numerous internet communication tools are available: email, Internet
Relay Chat (IRC), Webphone, Newsgroups, Netmeetings and so forth. However,
probably the most effective tool for hackers and activists is the listserver.
Listservers receive email and then forwards it to all the subscribers to
the list. Anyone who has an email address can easilly subscribe to
a listserver. In
CriticalMass - Sydney - What has it become? [Cmass] I
had the following to say about listservers.
-
A listserver can be like a newsletter, only there is no folding and
posting, no buying stamps, envelopes and paper, no maintaining lists of
addresses, no formatting and editing. Listservers are cheap so no volunteer
time wasted collecting money from members. Basically list servers are less
work.
-
Listservers don't have to wait for a newsletter deadline, so you can
send news out as often as you want. Consequently, the listserver is an
excellent way to mobilise lots of people fast. When Tollaust tried to discourage
cyclists from using the M2 motorway by charging them as much as cars, 130
cyclists organised a protest in a week using email as the main form of
communication.
-
A listserver can be like an on-line meeting, with many advantages. A
meeting with fifteen or more people often turns into a rabble, with only
the loud, domineering people getting heard over the rest. A listserver
provides everyone with equal opportunity to partake in discussions. This
has moulded well with the leaderless structure of critical mass. If you
do get a rambler, you can skim their email and delete it, a bit like fast
forward someone in a meeting. Because people write more precisely than
they talk, more people can fit in a listserver discussion. No time is wasted
travelling to the meeting and people can partake at a time convenient for
them. Consequently, we have twenty times as many people on our listserver
as we have at critical mass meetings. When people take part in developing
an idea, they are likely to help put the idea into practice. With so many
people on our listservers we have been getting lots of great ideas, but
more importantly, lots of volunteers.
-
Issues can be discussed as they arise rather than waiting a week or
two for the next meeting. Lately, people have been writing letters to newspapers,
politicians and government agencies and copying them to the list. Each
witty letter seems to encourage others to write and an unofficial letter
writing campaign has started.
-
International conferences are as easy as communicating with people in
your own city. We regularly talk with critical mass participants around
the world.
-
No resources are wasted taking minutes. That is handled by list archives.
While listservers are incredibly effective, they do have limitations.
-
In Silicon Valley it is said, "and the geeks shall rule the earth".
Scarily, this prophecy is very close to the truth. A couple of years after
introducing the critical mass email list our monthly meetings had
all but died, issues were discussed and decisions made on the internet.
The problem is that three quarters of Australian's are not connected to
the net and hence don't have access to decision making. Hence the geeks
with internet access are effectively ruling critical mass.
-
Protocols used by most listservers state that participants should only
post to the list if they can add something new. "Me too" and "I agree"
emails are frowned upon. As a consequence one should not assume that just
because most of the postings on the list promote an argument, that the
majority of the people on the list agree with that argument. The counter
argument may have been presented very comprehensively once and no one has
more to add. Hence, an alternative to listservers should be used if voting
is required.
-
When discussions become complicated, like nutting out detailed technical
problems, listservers become less effective because delays between messages
slows down the creative process. Meetings, net conferences and internet
chat relays are better in these situations.
-
Email based communication does not use all the human senses when communicating.
People build relationships faster when they have access to sight, sound
and smell. It is through trust and relationships that people determine
whether to organise a joint action with each other. Listservers are excellent
for brainstorming, but often people will not go that extra step and volunteer
to take on a task. I've found a follow up one-to-one phone call with some
of the key participants in a discussion helps convert an idea into action.
Motivating and networking
In order to attract people to a cause, people need to know there is a problem,
that a solution exists and that they can do something to make it happen.
Good motivators can significantly improve the effectiveness of an organisation.
Within
critical mass Sydney somewhere between 200 and 1000 people
would turn up to rides, however only about five to ten percent of those
would do anything extra. This is not necessarily because they don't want
to do more, often they don't know how.
Before I became a cycling activist, I attended a council meeting where
cycling issues were being discussed. After the meeting, the vice president
of Bicycle NSW stood on a chair and gave a speech encouraging us to continue
our lobbying. I walked away from the meeting alone, wondering how.
Ten years later and after writing this paper, I realise it is difficult
to explain effective lobbying in a short speech and different people are
most effective in different ways.
For a couple of years, I stood in front of
critical mass Sydney
before and after rides to announce the latest news. As a consequence people
would often ring or approach me and ask where we were headed next, or suggest
ways to improve
critical mass. After answering their queries, I'd
ask a few questions.
-
What do you do?
-
What are you interested in?
-
If you ran critical mass what would you change?
Then I'd listen. Usually these people either had great ideas but didn't
know how to implement them, or had talents and interests they wanted to
use. All I needed to do was suggest an idea, or put them in contact with
others with similar interests and they greatly increased their effectiveness
as activists. I had the most success when I'd offer to coach or help them.
For instance, I'd offer to proof read a press release if they wrote it.
To facilitate this I set up a
brightideas web page and built myself an activist phone book, with peoples
contact details, interests and talents. A public phone list would have
been better, but many people like to keep contact details private, especially
in a movement which occasionally boarders on illegality.
A good motivator also benefits from the characteristics of a good leader.
-
Give credit where credit is due. Pass on credit to the person who deserves
it.
-
Only suggest people do things you would be prepared to do yourself.
-
Never use guilt as a motivator, even if the volunteer lets you down. Nothing
looses volunteers faster than making them feel bad.
-
A person who is working hard is a better motivator. People are happy to
help out, but don't like being ordered around by someone sitting back and
taking all the glory.
Conclusion
When you set out to build up an activist movement, don't worry about setting
up traditional heirachical structures. They are not needed and will
probably limit the potential of your organisation. Build up the communication
channels between activists and lever the new tools provided by the internet.
They are a gift for activists.
Save the world and don't forget to have fun.
About the author
At 30, Cameron Shorter describes himself as a computer hacker, cycling
activist, and proud father of two young boys.
He has invested significant time promoting
criticalmass in Sydney, Australia, giving interviews to the media, building
up a fact pack on cycling, designing web pages and organising publicity
stunts. He rides a bicycle to work.
He is one of the computer hackers who developed the activist calendar
and news site
http://www.active.org.au
which allows anyone to write their own uncensored news story.
He helps with the system administration of the activist internet service
provider (ISP)
http://www.cat.org.au.
He now works as the
Webmapping Manager for
SocialchangeOnline, where he tries to apply the ideas presented in this paper.
His latest and most ambitious project is to write a web
based cycle mapping program which will allow cyclists to enter their
favourite bike routes on a map in a web browser, and for those routes to
be collected into a central database and redistributed as bike maps.
He figures he only has another fifty years to live, and is desperately
trying to cram as much as he can into his life before he is dead.
Bibliography and further
reading
[Bid] Biddulph, Steve;
The secret of happy
children; Angus & Robertson 1984; ISBN 0 207 18945 5.
[Cmass] Shorter, Cameron.:
Critical Mass
- Sydney - What has it become?, http://www.nccnsw.org.au/~cmass/reports/articles/about.shtml
- cached
[Free] Freeman, Jo.:
The Tyranny of Structurelessness,
Berkeley Journal of Sociology in 1970:
http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/hist_texts/structurelessness.html
-
cached
[High] Highleyman, Liz A.:
An Introduction
to Anarchism,
http://www.freespeech.org/ledland/Anarchism/Highleyman_AnIntroductionToAnarchism.html
-
cached
[Jar] Raymond, Eric S.:
The Jargon File,
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/.
Definitions of computer geek terms.
[Noos] Raymond, Eric S.:
Homesteading the
Noosphere,
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/homesteading/homesteading/
-
cached. The second in a series
of essays which define the computer hacker culture.
